Decatur start up aims to find the best blogs

Google.com has an algorithm. Regator.com has Kimberly Turner.

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Regator screenshot.

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MIKKI K. HARRIS / mkharris@ajc.com

Scott Lockhart (from left), Kimberly Turner and Chris Turner, founders of blog aggregator Regator.com, often hold meetings around the kitchen table.

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She’s 33, an Atlanta magazine writer, and curator of blogs on the young, Decatur-born aggregating Web site. On an Internet increasingly filled with noise and fluff, she sifts through hardly updated, long-forgotten, navel-gazing diatribes to find good writing and interesting discussions. She shuffles the best into categories on Regator, making it easier for users to find quality posts sorted by topic.

Since the site launched in August, she’s added more than 9,000 blogs to Regator categories, building each for quality, not quantity. Usually, she hunts blogs quietly, on the couch at home. For one week every month, she opens the site to nominations, and gets up to 400 suggestions per day.

Her rejection rate: about 75 percent.

Time consuming? Yes. But it also makes them different, says Turner, who launched Regator with her husband, Scott Lockhart, the site’s designer and business mind, and her younger brother, Chris Turner, the site’s techno-geek.

It was supposed to be a real estate blog aggregator (RE-gator, get it?), a side project for Lockhart and Chris Turner. But once Chris had written the code, well, “it kind of seemed silly,” Chris Turner says. “It wasn’t that much harder.” Topics range from parenting to hipsters to animal rights to cricket to gadgets to, yes, real estate.

They know they can’t beat Google, which returns content broader than blogs or Bloglines, which requires readers to find their own favorites. They’re not even the blog search engine Technorati, which returns good blogs, but also blogs that haven’t been updated in years and never met an exclamation point they didn’t like.

“We’re selective in a way they’re not,” says Kimberly, who means that she, as editorial director, is picky. It’s not unusual anymore for her to have 50 browser tabs open while she searches for blogs. The side project turned 40-hour-per-week-after-work project is adding widgets and iPhone apps. It has yet to make a dime, but keeps drawing attention: online award nominations and soon, they hope, startup money. They don’t discuss traffic numbers, but admit they’re grateful for the day Google’s search spiders found them.

“I come from a corporate, bottom-line background,” Lockhart says. “We wouldn’t be wasting our time, the lack of sleep, if we didn’t think we could make money.”

For now, they take the idea of a family business to extremes: The three live together and hold meetings around the kitchen table. Chris Turner, the only one focusing on the project full time, wears his pajamas to the “office.”

“We’re accidental entrepreneurs,” Lockhart says. “A lot of people think we’re 30 people working out of an office — we’re three people working out of the house.”

Getting to the good stuff

What makes a good blog? Kimberly Turner has found about 9,000 to add so far to blog aggregator Regator.com, but rejects far more. She purges blogs listed on the site, too, if they go un-updated without explanation. Here’s a short look at what she thinks makes a good blog.

• Updates frequently.

• At least tries at good design, although that doesn’t help blog readers on Regator.com.

• Uses good grammar and spelling.

• Writes descriptive, informative headlines.

• Stays focused on certain topics.

• Produces original content, not just republished links or Twitter feeds.

• Writes in a thoughtful, engaging manner.